Reference Transactions are information consultations in which library staff recommend, interpret, evaluate, and/or use information resources to help others to meet particular information needs. Reference transactions do not include formal instruction or exchanges that provide assistance with locations, schedules, equipment, supplies, or policy statements.

Reference Work includes reference transactions and other activities that involve the creation, management, and assessment of information or research resources, tools, and services.

(The following bullets clarify what is meant by terms within the Reference Work definition.)

Creation and management of information resources includes the development and maintenance of research collections, research guides, catalogs, databases, web sites, search engines, etc., that patrons can use independently, in-house or remotely, to satisfy their information needs.

Assessment activities include the measurement and evaluation of reference work, resources, and services.

A personal reflection on the changing nature of reference work

When I studied librarianship, we had a whole unit on reference service provision, covering reference interviews, references collection management, ready reference tools, searching, and reference service design, delivery and evaluation. My first job at QUT Library was a position that had the title Reference Librarian. Most of my time was spent staffing the reference desk at Gardens Point or the virtual (chat) reference service (at that stage only available a few hours a day), plus I spent some time answering email enquiries too. The other big part of my role was assisting the liaison librarians that worked with the faculty of business in ordering books. On my first day in the library, I was sent to the print reference collection with the instruction that I was to get familiar with it.

I left QUT for the National Library, where I completed nine months of rotations through the library on the graduate program. My favourite placement was in the reference service area, where I felt at home because I had an affinity for working with customers, I had experience working with a system that was being implemented to manage virtual reference, and I made a meaningful contribution to work in the area (which is often not the case on a graduate program, where the aim is to get familiar with the business of the organisation rather than to get work done). When I finished the graduate program, I ended up cataloguing serials, and I got myself back to reference services as quickly as I could! As a reference librarian, I spent my time answering email enquiries from people all around the country and the world, working on subject guides, staffing the reference desks in three of the library’s reading rooms, staffing the virtual reference service AskNow, and contributing to the administration of AskNow. Eventually, I ended up looking after the reader education program at the library and running the first collaborative instant messaging (IM) reference service across the national libraries of Australia and New Zealand and all of the Australian state libraries. (You can read about the AskNow IM trial in this article in Australian Library Journal.) I loved my job as a reference librarian and both I and my boss wondered how I would fare moving to a back of house, specialist role when I left the National Library.

On revisiting the literature related to reference services as I was selecting readings for this week, I encountered words like evolution, rethinking, and reinventing absolutely everywhere. Revisiting the literature confirmed what I knew from experience and observation: reference work has changed significantly since I was a reference librarian.

Reference then and now

This week, I want you to get familiar with what ‘reference’ means now, and what it meant in the past.

Why am I getting you to think about the past? My personal view is that we are hanging on to remnants of the way things used to be when it’s time we let those go.

I’ll give you one example that’s a particular soap box of mine: subject guides. Subject guides are detailed guides to what’s in the collection on a given subject. Many libraries still produce them, and it’s my opinion that most of the libraries that still create subject guides shouldn’t be producing them at all. I’m going to leave you to draw your own conclusions on this subject as you read and discuss this week.

The term ‘reference’ is intrinsically linked to the idea of a reference collection and I wonder if continuing to use this term ties us to old models and old ways of thinking.

To help you understand where the term has come from, it’s important to consider what reference used to be and what it is today.

13 Comments

Just started reading this and in the Wikipedia Generation article coming to grips with the acronyms, just learnt PDA is Patron Driven Acquisition-
which seems to have pros & cons. ALIA had goodarticle which was very postiveeticleshttps://www.alia.org.au/sites/default/files/publishing/Incite%20November%3ADecember%202013_EEI.pdf
Anitra

I actually found these wikipedia perspectives really interesting. I was only in grade 12 six years ago, and wikipedia was a GIANT no- no. You basically failed your assignment if you referenced it. To read that it is a potential reference source now is interesting to me, as programs and technologies do change over time, and if libraries and other reference material can be found through links on wikipedia than it kind of becomes an alright thing. But then, how reliable is the information if you can still edit content in there? Interesting!

It’s tricky… A long, long time ago, I went to an info session on Wikipedia at the National Library. This was way back when Wikipedia was just becoming a big deal. One of the presenters deliberately made a typo in an entry right before the session started. 15 minutes later when he went to show us how easy it was to edit by fixing his deliberate typo, someone had already fixed it. People are pretty vigilant about cultivating and caring for the entries they value. That’s not to say it’s all good stuff. There was an interesting study recently comparing bias in Britannica and Wikipedia, and back in 2005, Nature did a study that found Britannica had more errors than Wikipedia: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

I think the real crux of this for me is that if we as information professionals care about the quality of articles on Wikipedia, then perhaps we should get in there and contribute and help create quality content.

PS. Most lecturers would still be pretty concerned to see Wikipedia in your reference list!

All good! Hope I didn’t sound like a cranky pants! Quick Find is your friend though, and it’s really good to get into the habit of looking for the information yourself, because you need to be a pro searcher! (Also, it’s good for me to get into the habit of checking links!)

Meta

All icons used on this site are sourced from The Noun Project (or derived from icons available there), and used under the terms of their premium subscription. This subscription allows the use of icons without attribution.